A good introduction to basic rigging and some useful tips like using CTRL-N to recalculate bone normal orientation, something you don't think of as a useful command, but it´s very usefull to have the bone´s Z axis pointing in the right direction.

Continue Reading 'Flying Bird - Character Rigging Series.' »

Elephants Dream will be playing in Dutch art house movie theaters as a short 'pre-movie' for the new Dutch production 'Dutch Touch', a documentary on Dutch hiphop culture. (To see a trailer of 'Dutch Touch', visit their website, wait through the intro and then select 'trailer').

Continue Reading 'Elephants Dream Playing in Dutch Cinemas' »

Timothy Kanters, one of the founders of Elysiun/BlenderArtists, has decided to stop managing his website.

Continue Reading 'Timothy Leaves BlenderArtists' »

Already wondering why the CVS report hadn't appeared?

No, we didn't ditch it, but we did wait for some new features to be available before posting the report.

The title gives you a hint, but I'm sure you aren't even close to imagine what changed this past month.

Continue Reading 'November CVS Report: Render passes, bug fixing …' »

Chris wrote to us about his service Polorix.net, a free file hosting service for Blender users.

Continue Reading 'File Hosting for the Blender Community' »

The old joke is that the first render every new 3D artist makes is a chrome sphere on a checker plane. How would you like to take that to the next level and create the most captivating and visually appealing sphere render? How about sharing it with a few hundred others? CGsphere was created with exactly that purpose!

Continue Reading 'CGSphere' »

We reported on the redesign of the BlenderArtists.org forum a few weeks ago (not a 're'-design, actually, but a 'design' as the old forum was an out-of-the-box template). Looking at the amount of comments both on BlenderArtists itself and on our post, many people have problems with this new design, including myself. But not anymore!

Continue Reading 'Pimp My BlenderArtists.org!' »

Several months back, blenderage posted a mini tutorial showing how to use a smoothing groups-like technique to get better detail from low poly models.  Game makers, you might want to see this if you haven't already.

Continue Reading 'Tutorial: Better Detail From Low Poly Models' »

Satoshi sent in the following article: Ekakiya, one of the famous Blender gurus, shows us a nice demonstration of material nodes, composite nodes and tangent bump mappings at BlenderArtists. It's quite impressive: not only does he show rendered images but also snapshots of these nodes. The snapshots are totally complex, but have comments to describe how the part works.

Continue Reading 'Illustration style render demo and nodes system proposals' »

Need a good example of using Stretch IK in a rig? Or how about a simple rig like those seen from Animation Mentor? We've attempted to round up a collection of links to the available rigs out there and we even have a few new ones to show you.

Continue Reading 'Rigs! Rigs! Everywhere!' »

We were contacted by Blender.org's e-shop manager Anja who told us that after selling 4,000 copies, the Blender 2.3 Guide is now sold out and that they will not be printing any new ones. At this moment, you will only be able to find the 2.3 Guide on Amazon.co.uk

Continue Reading 'Blender 2.3 Guide Sold Out' »

Sure, Blender has a built-in Game Engine but, don't let its primary functionality box you into just thinking about games. Think outside of the box, and you'll find that it's very useful for many different things. Mike Pan (aka mpan3) has done just that.

Continue Reading 'Using Blender's Game Engine for More Than Just Games (updated)' »

alt_ligury has posted a really nice tutorial on how to do a realistic portrait. Not only is the tutorial made really well, but the result is amazing (see inset).

Continue Reading 'Tutorial: Realistic Portrait' »

Some of you might remember Colin Litser's cloud creation tutorial. Which took a look at creating volumetric cloud effects in Blender. But how about taking it a step further. Who hasn't wanted to blow up a building in a fiery explosion? (in 3D of course!) Or how about launching a comet into orbit?

Continue Reading 'Tutorial: Fake Volumetrics' »

During Siggraph 2006 I met Jason van Gumster; many people know him as Groo or Fweeb (on forums ), who demostrated the fluid simulation capabilities of Blender. He runs a small animation and print design company (Hand Turkey Studios) in Richmond, Virginia and they use Blender for nearly all of their animation needs.

Continue Reading 'Interview with Jason Van Gumster (Groo)' »